Already covered by Nick and others, but when in doubt, sandwich!
What can I say that ZZ Top hasn’t said better -
I like the enchiladas and the teriyaki too
I even like the chicken if the sauce is not too blue.
When I don’t feel like cooking, I order delivery, we have a really good Italian delivery place around here. :)
Same meal, different show: Fantasy Island, me and my brother on TV-dinner-night on select Friday nights in 1970s.
I am a lazy person’s lazy person, and yet I make pizza two to three times a month. The secret is to make a batch of dough beforehand and store it in your freezer. The prerequisite is a good kitchen mixer with a dough hook attachment, but pizza dough is dead simple. Once you have fresh homemade dough, you have transcended all frozen and most chain pizza joints in flavor, especially if you like wheat crust:
For 2 crusts: (double for 4)
1 cup warm water
2 tsp activated yeast
1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbl oil
3-4 cups flour (bread flour makes softer lighter crust but all-purpose works too. For a great whole-wheat crust, use 3 parts white to 1 part whole wheat flour)
Put the water in the mixer bowl and add everything else: yeast, then salt and oil, then 2 cups of flour on top. Start the mixer on medium-slow and let it go 2 minutes. The dough will look like a gloppy mess. Add flour 1/2 a cup at a time until it forms a ball and cleans the sides of the bowl. Let it run for 5 minutes then oil the bowl, scrape the dough off the hook with a spatula and cover the bowl with a towel to let it rise for 45 minutes.
Slap the dough onto a floured counter, stretch it out to resemble a loaf of french bread and cut it up into 2 or 4 pieces depending on whether you doubled the recipe or not. Put all the extra pieces in ziploc bags and throw them in the freezer. To roll out the dough I usually just use a rolling pin though I have been known to throw the dough if I’m feeling cocky. Take a pizza pan and lightly oil and dust it with corn flour and toss your crust on there. Pinch or fold over the edges to create retaining walls for the sauce and cheese. Put it in the oven for about 8 minutes at 425 to firm it up and then pull it back out and top it with whatever you like. To make it really special you can buy fresh mozzarella at your gourmet market, but the supermarket stuff is not going to disappoint. When it’s ready to bake, slide the pizza off the pizza pan directly onto the center rack of your oven, and bake it for 10-15 minutes, depending on the water content of your toppings. Pepperoni is going to cook faster than tomato, zucchini, and spinach because of all the extra water. Baking the crust naked gives it a crispness underneath that I find ever so pleasing. This is such a simple and dare I say, fun meal to whip up that never ever fails to please everybody. You just have to remember to take one of the crusts out of the freezer the morning you want to have pizza for dinner. Do the batches of crust on Sunday and make sure you have sauce and cheese on hand and you can have fresh homemade pizza any day of the week in about twenty minutes.
Or you can buy frozen, not that there’s anything wrong with that!
Best frozen food ever = Red Baron French Bread Pizza.
Anything else is uncivilized.
Stouffer’s Lasagna. Microwave it, to get that burned outer layer. That burned shit is the best.
I can only find them at WalMart, which is why I buy them ever-so-rarely, but there is a line of frozen ‘Chinese’ meals by Tai-Pei that are packaged in Chinese take-out boxes. Looking at the random one I grabbed for lunch today, Spicy Szechuan Style Chicken, it’s less than 500 calories, 8g of fat (1g being saturated, no trans fat), 30mg of cholesterol, and 1518mg sodium. That last bit is REALLY bad (63% of daily value), but the rest of it not so much, especially for 14 ounces of food.
So I’m not the only one. I loved that burn cheese in those meals.
Bump for extremely good advice here. Those Bertolli meals absolutely rock if you like Italian food. They taste as good as if not better than some restaraunts around here trying to pass as Italian.
Pro tip: Get some homemade sauce from the deli and add a small amount to the meals as well. Perfection.
What the hell was the name of those things? Do they still exist?
I was at Publix today buying groceries and I couldn’t find them anywhere.
Sweet jesus.
The worst thing about that package is that there’s only about a thousand calories in it, so you can expect some people to eat two or three in a day.
… every day.
… until they die a week later?
I go out of my way to try as many different frozen dinners as possible in order to sort out which ones to stock my freezer with and which aren’t fit for human consumption.
I’ve found that the $2-$3 dinners tend to be miles above the $1-$2, and I typically stock up when any of the $3 meals I like are on sale for ~$2. I also recommend always using the oven or stovetop method over microwaving. It makes a huge difference and doesn’t take all that much longer.
My recommendations are as follows.
Marie Callendar’s:
Country Fried Chicken with Gravy
Beef Tips with Mushroom Sauce and Green Beans
Country Fried Pork Chop with Mashed Potatoes
Chicken Fettucine Alfredo
Boston Market:
Roasted Pork with Mashed Red Potatoes
Chicken Parmigiana
Swanson/Hungry-Man:
Classic Fried Chicken with Potatoes and Corn
Claimjumper:
Chicken Fried Steak with Gravy and Potatoes
Another combination of frozen foods that go awesome together involves buying No Name Frozen Wild Rice Meatballs, which gives you 4 individual sealed servings of tasty meatballs, along with just-add-hot-water Bowl-Appetit Pasta Alfredo noodle bowls. Bake the meatballs for about 30 minutes, then toss them into the cooked Pasta Alfredo noodle bowl. You’ll be surprised how well they go together.
Want to hear something mildly ironic about the Hungry Man dinners and your comments?
I was in the checkout lane with a bunch of them a while ago, and this very obese guy had a heart attack and died, not more than 15 feet away from me at the slurpee/coke machine. I posted about it here after it happened. And yes, I had like 3 of the “all day breakfast’s” that were getting scanned as the paramedics gave up on him.
“NO REFUNDS!”
That or a quick pasta - Alfredo or other classics takes less time to prepare than a sandwich.
For those late days we always make sure to have something in the freezer - we have a kickass tomatosauce recipe that takes 3-5 hours to make, but handles freezing really well, so we always make a huge portion.
Of course being a small country means that we only have a small selection of certain niche products, so there’s no ‘best’ tv-dinner here. Our tv-dinners are for the can’t-cook-won’t-cook crowd and the selection varies from ‘crap’ to ‘fucking crap’.
When that is said, a frozen pizza can be made edible if you have some parmesan, basil and good cold pressed olive oil to spice it up.